'Dangerous' Bill may criminalise employers

THE GOVERNMENT'S new Employment Law Compliance Bill is an "appalling and dangerous" piece of legislation, a conference on employment law was told at the weekend.

Addressing the conference organised by Thomson Round Hall, barrister Tom Mallon said the legislation would create 23 new criminal offences for breaches of employment law.

He said there were civil remedies for breaches of employment law, whether it be under unfair dismissals legislation, in the Labour Court or the civil courts.

However, he said the new Bill put forward a new layer of "criminalisation of employment law".

Mr Mallon said calls by unions for more legislation on employment matters would lead to the greater involvement of lawyers.

"The extraordinary situation now seems to be proposed [in the legislation] that if an employer dismisses an employee because that employee refuses to transfer from full-time work to part-time work or vice versa, then that employer is guilty of a criminal offence".

"If that is what is proposed, then there can be no doubt but that employers will involve lawyers much more frequently in relation to their employment matters", he said.

Mr Mallon also told the conference that the often-repeated calls for legal intervention to protect individual rights could lead to a situation where trade unions lost one of their traditional roles, to enforce compliance by employers.

"It seems to me that the trade unions have abandoned involvement in processing claims under the Unfair Dismissals Act and have largely abandoned processing claims under the equality legislation".

"It seems to me that they are at risk of losing involvement in a number of other areas, in particular in relation to the protection of the interests of workers on fixed-term contracts and there must be a question as to whether or not the forthcoming Employment Law Compliance Act will, whilst perhaps protecting individual workers, further undermine an important role of trade unions", he said.

Mr Mallon said if lawyers were to become a regular feature before the Labour Court, it could only be a matter of time before they began to be more frequently involved in purely industrial relations matters.

"If collective agreements have the potential to be legally enforced or are likely to result in litigation, then is it not only a matter of time before such agreements are subject to legal review?"